Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Director: Michael Cimino
Writer: Michael Cimino
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, George KEnnedy and Geoffrey Lewis

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I could have sworn that I’d seen Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, along with every other film that Clint Eastwood made during the seventies, but I was wrong because this was new to me.

It’s an odd film in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s a very likeable film even though I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be. If any character in it charmed us in real life, we’d be worse off for the experience. For another, it’s violent crime action in the seventies style but told as an easy and free sixties road movie. In fact, it’s not too hard to see it as a modern take on the end of the Old West from debuting Michael Cimino.

It starts out with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot meeting for the first time, even if the former isn’t introduced for quite a while. Lightfoot is Jeff Bridges, who walks into Dependable Pete’s Used Cars in leather trousers and steals a car. Five minutes on, he swerves into a wheatfield to avoid a preacher, knocking down the man shooting at him. Eastwood is the priest.

Regardless of the outfit, they’re clearly both crooks, willing to lie, cheat and steal to obtain whatever they want. They don’t treat women much better either, because they’re just more things to take. That said, they have character. Bridges endows Lightfoot with a joy of life and an attachment to nothing but a dream to one day be able to buy a white Cadillac convertible with real money. Eastwood gives him free rein to steal every scene, but serves as his tether to reality. This picture runs for almost two hours, but I doubt Lightfoot would have lasted half an hour without Thunderbolt, two names Cimino borrowed from 1955’s Captain Lightfoot.

Half the film seems to be taken up with a set of encounters with quirky characters, some of whom are trying to kill them, and an enforced side trip into gorgeous countryside to escape. That ends when the plot eventually shows up.

Eastwood is Thunderbolt, not that we were in any doubt about that, and he’s so named for the ridiculously large cannon he used during the war and also to break into the bank vault at Montana Armor. He’s a legend, albeit poor because the half a million dollars his team got away with is still where he hid it. The folk who are trying to kill them are former cohorts, Red Leary and Eddie Goody, erronously believing news reports that state that it was recovered and so Thunderbolt must have sold them out.

My biggest problem with this entire film is that Thunderbolt never went to get that cash. He’s the only one alive who knows where it is and he was waiting for his colleagues, but they want to kill him. Why not take it for himself?

It’s Lightfoot who prompts him to go get it before they stop for ice cream and find Red and Goody in the back seat, shotguns pointed at their heads. The catch is that they find the country schoolhouse in which he hid it gone, replaced by a modern one. So, rather than end the picture there, Lightfoot suggests that they do it all again: rob the same place in the same way. Halfway, this becomes a heist movie.

Of course, the actor I know best here is Clint Eastwood, who I grew up watching, even if I’d inexplicably missed this one. He does what he does and is the closest thing to a conscience in the movie. I know Jeff Bridges too but this was early for him. He’d debuted on film in 1970 but built a reputation in films like The Last Picture Show, Fat City and The Last American Hero, so it’s easy to believe him so effortless four years in.

However, I’m watching for George Kennedy, who plays Red Leary with a powerful sense of callousness and viciousness that’s all the more obvious because nobody else has it. Lightfoot probably thinks he’s an outlaw folk hero and Thunderbolt is an experienced thief. Goody, played perfectly by Geoffrey Lewis, is a dumb sidekick. They could have all cameoed in The Dukes of Hazzard and nobody would have got hurt. Red, however, would have killed half the cast. Kennedy would have been one hundred years old on 18th February.

Kennedy was hardly new to film, debuting on the big screen in 1961 in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and he wasn’t new to playing villains either, having played memorable ones in Lonely are the Brave, Charade and Strait-Jacket. However, he was never as vicious as this, with his action-packed final scenes a neat reflection of that, just as his colleagues get different final scenes that are reflections of their characters, tragic, legendary or just sad.

Given that the film is called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot for a reason, highlighting how much this is a buddy movie as much as a road movie and a heist movie, Kennedy and Lewis have a lot less screen time but Red doesn’t care. It’s a safe bet that, to him, this is his movie and the rest of the cast can go hang. Kennedy sees that and runs with it and, while it sometimes feels like he’s acting in a different movie, it’s highly appropriate and intensely memorable.

Kennedy made a lot of films memorable and had already won an Oscar for playing Dragline in Cool Hand Luke, but he came late to a career in acting, even though he’d debuted on stage at only two years of age, because he enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and stayed in for sixteen years, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and earning a pair of Bronze Stars. He was discharged due to a back injury, having reached the rank of captain.

His first role was on television, as both actor and technical advisor, as a military policeman on The Phil Silvers Show. That led to many other shows, often westerns, and, soon after, films. The earliest I’ve seen him is 1964’s Strait-Jacket, McHale’s Navy and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, none of which were westerns, but he was able to shift effortlessly between genres, at home as much in The Flight of the Phoenix as The Dirty Dozen or Cool Hand Luke, all of which predated this, as did my backup choice of Tick, Tick, Tick. He also appeared in Airport in 1970 and would go on to be the only actor to appear in all four films in that series, avoiding Airplane! because he didn’t want to lose that recurring role. He ended up playing Leslie Nielsen’s captain in all three Naked Gun movies instead.

I’m rather surprised to realise that I haven’t seen many of his later films, the most recent a voice role as Brick Bazooka in Small Soldiers in 1998 and those before that probably the Naked Gun trilogy from 1988 to 1994. I know him as a sixties and seventies actor with a few eighties roles like Savage Dawn and The Delta Force.

However, he was a busy actor until 2014, his last role in The Gambler, in which he died in the opening scene, appropriately enough passing the torch to the next generation.